Leaving the Milk River Valley, we began to curve southward, passing Fort Assiniboin on our right. In this region and beyond at Fort Benton great herds of cattle are grazed by Government contractors, who supply the posts with beef. At the Big Sandy Station they were shipping cattle eastward. We crossed the Marias River (originally named Maria’s River), a stream that had the respectful attention of Lewis and Clarke, and the Teton, a wilfully erratic watercourse in a narrow valley, which caused the railway constructors a good deal of trouble. We looked down, in passing, on Fort Benton, nestled in a bend of the Missouri; a smart town, with a daily newspaper, an old trading station. Shortly after leaving Assiniboin we saw on our left the Bear Paw Mountains and the noble Highwood Mountains, fine peaks, snow-dusted, about thirty miles from us, and adjoining them the Belt Mountains. Between them is a shapely little pyramid called the Wolf Butte. Far to our right were the Sweet Grass Hills, on the Canada line, where gold-miners are at work. I have noted of all this country that it is agriculturally fine. After Fort Benton we had glimpses of the Rockies, off to the right (we had seen before the Little Rockies in the south, towards Yellowstone Park); then the Bird-tail Divide came in sight, and the mathematically Square Butte, sometimes called Fort Montana. At noon, November 20th, we reached Great Falls, where the Sun River, coming in from the west, joins the Missouri. The railway crosses the Sun River, and runs on up the left bank of the Missouri. Great Falls, which lies in a bend of the Missouri on the cast side, was not then, but soon will be, connected with the line by a railway bridge. I wish I could convey to the reader some idea of the beauty of the view as we came out upon the Sun River Valley, or the feeling of exhilaration and elevation we experienced. I had come to no place before that did not seem remote, far from home, lonesome. Here the aspect was friendly, livable, almost home-like. We seemed to have come out, after a long journey, to a place where one might be content to stay for some time—to a far but fair country, on top of the world, as it were. Not that the elevation is great—only about 3000 feet above the sea—nor the horizon illimitable, as on the great plains; its spaciousness is brought within human sympathy by guardian hills and distant mountain ranges.